Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

The Great Barrier Reef: Have we Really Lost Half of It? [Part 1: Water Quality]

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IT was all over the news again this morning, that unless action is taken to improve water quality the Great Barrier Reef could be placed on the World Heritage list of sites in danger and by the way, there has already been a 50 percent decline in coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef.

No wonder the average person is concerned about the environment! Such casual reporting that we have already lost a full half of the Great Barrier Reef!

Photograph by Walter Starck
Photograph by Walter Starck

This publicity is all part of a campaign to stop the development of new port facilities along the Queensland coastline. But rather than just come out and say they don’t want more development– that in fact they despise industry– the activist scientists dress it up as the end of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it. [Read more…] about The Great Barrier Reef: Have we Really Lost Half of It? [Part 1: Water Quality]

Consensus and Controversy: The Debate on Man-Made Global Warming

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‘IN open societies where both scientists and the general public are equipped with critical skills and the tools of inquiry, not least enabled by the information revolution provided through the Internet, the ethos of science as open, questioning, critical and anti-dogmatic should and can be defended also by the public at large. Efforts to make people bow uncritically to the authority of a dogmatic representation of Science, seems largely to produce ridicule, opposition and inaction, and ultimately undermines the legitimacy and role of both science and politics in open democracies.’

That’s the final paragraph in a new report by Emil A. Røyrvik; a social anthropologist and senior research scientists at SINTEF Technology and Society, Scandinavia’s largest independent research organisation.

The report about “the debate on man-made global warming” including an analysis of “the four myths of climate change”, “the hockey stick”, “climategate” and surveys and petitions of dissenting and contrarian positions.

Dr Røyrvik comes at the issue from an academic perspective and very clearly articulates the strength of the consensus position but also the logic of the contrarians – as he labels us.

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Sarah Ferguson Defends Abattoir Footage of Dubious Origin

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IN June 2011 the Australian government halted all live cattle exports to Indonesia after ABC Four Corners broadcast disturbing footage of Australian cattle being mistreated in Indonesian abattoirs. As I wrote in May 2012, Australians were lead to believe that this footage, that shocked the nation, was typical of what occurs inside many abattoirs in Indonesia and that the footage was taken by Lyn White from Animals Australia [1]. However, according to British filmmakers Gem and Ian from ‘Tracks Investigations’ they were responsible for the footage that sparked massive public opposition [2]. Nowhere in the Four Corners program is the involvement of these professional filmmakers declared; activists who for a fee “offer a comprehensive global investigation and film production service to conservation, environmental and animal protection groups.”[3]

In the following email, which Sarah Ferguson from ABC Four Corners has asked me to publish, she explains that my recent column in The Land on the same topic is “mischievous” [4]. In particular she claims a first hand knowledge of the situation in Indonesia and that half the abattoir footage in the program was filmed by Four Corners.

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The Apple on the Banana Again: Marcott Admits Temperature Spike Not Robust

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IT is terribly unfashionable to admit it, but I’ve just never been able to believe that the late 20th Century was particularly warm. This admission despite ‘the hockey stick’ graph that featured so prominently in the United Nation’s third IPCC assessment report, and despite that amazing looking chart in Al Gore’s movie that also showed a recent spike in global temperatures relative to the last many thousand years.

My key problem with the ‘the hockey stick’ has always been that the upward spike representing runaway global warming in the 20th Century was never of the same stuff as the rest of the chart. That is the spike is largely based on the instrumental temperature record i.e. the thermometer record, while the downward trending line that it was grafted on to, is based on proxies, in particular estimates of temperature derived from studies of tree rings.

It has always, for me, been a case of Michael Mann comparing apples and oranges, or to put it another way sticking an apple on the end of a banana.

The Michael Mann and Shaun Marcott Hockey Sticks

Worst the grafting was necessary because the proxy record, i.e. the tree ring record, shows that global temperatures have declined since about 1960.

Of course we know that global temperature haven’t declined since 1960, or thereabout, so there must be something wrong with the proxy record. This is known as “the divergence problem” and it is a problem, because if tree rings are not a good indicator of global temperature after 1960, how can they be a good indicator of global temperature prior to 1960?

Indeed there doesn’t appear to be a reliable method for reconstructing the last 100 or so years based on the standard techniques used to reconstruct the last 2,000, 4,000 and even 11,000 years of global temperature.

So when someone claims the past 10 years have been hotter than the past 11,300 years, as the Australian Broadcasting Commission did recently [1], there is good reason to cringe.

Of course the ABC didn’t make it up. They were reporting on the work of climate scientists recently published in a reputable journal. In particular a paper by Shaun Marcott and colleagues published in Science [2].

Sceptic, mathematician and blogger, Steve McIntyre, broke the original hockey stick into bits to do a thorough analysis, showing that the entire shaft, not just post 1960, was a fancy construct to create the impression of runaway global warming [3], and he’s done the same with this new Marcott fabrication [2].

While some who read this blog may cringe at my use of the word fabrication, it is more than justified because as Dr Marcott now admits in his own words[4]:

“[T]he 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record.”

In summary, Dr Marcott created the perception of a spike in temperatures the same way Michael Mann did in that first hockey stick paper that featured so prominently in the third IPCC report, by comparing apples and oranges… or perhaps best described as grafting an apple onto the end of a banana.

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1. Earth on track to be hottest in human history: study . March 8, 2013
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-08/climate-study/4561164

2. A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. Marcott et al.. Science, Volume 339, No. 6124, pages 1198-1201.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract

Abstract: Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (

3. see http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-ee-2005.pdf and more http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/ and the latest http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/31/the-marcott-filibuster/

4. Response by Marcott et al. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/

FOIA, Government-funded Climate science and Hole-digging

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FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that probably inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the “hacker” calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009. In a recent email he explained: “The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”

By providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded global warming industry.

I recently scrutinized documents from a successful FOI request by John Abbot to the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, DCCEE. As far as I can make out from the documents the entire Australian Climate Change Science Program can be likened to what Mr FOIA describes as “a massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor” for which the climate scientists are generously remunerated by the Australian taxpayer. Let me explain in more detail:

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Media Rules Prohibit Dissent

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MODERN history suggests that democracy aligns, and progresses, with the expansion of civil liberties, including access by ordinary citizens to government information. But the new media reform bills tabled in [Australian] federal Parliament last week appear unashamedly about the introduction of an additional layer of bureaucracy unaccountable to the public or the judiciary.

To address the potential problem of a concentration of media control, the government appears determined to concentrate the power of oversight into the hands of a single political appointee – the public interest media advocate (PIMA) – entrusted to be wise enough to act in the public interest.

The PIMA will administer public interest tests in the merger or takeovers of media interests. But unlike other areas of government where there is a public interest test, such as the application of freedom of information laws, the decisions of the PIMA will not be subject to judicial review or appeal through the courts.

It may even be unique in this respect.

Under the constitution, the doctrine of the separation of powers divides the institutions of government into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial.

The legislature makes the laws, the executive put the laws into operation, and the judiciary interprets the laws.

This doctrine is often assumed to be one of the cornerstones of fair government. It enables an entity separate from the executive to review a government decision such as that resulting from the implementation of a public interest test.

But this is possible only if the specific legislation embodying a public interest test has incorporated this safeguard for an appeal through the courts.

This is the case, for example under freedom of information legislation, FOI. In contrast, under the proposed media reform legislation, review of decisions will not be available.

The explanatory memorandum says these processes would be costly and time consuming to review, but we consider such an argument entirely unpersuasive.

The new public interest test will be considered in addition to the existing Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s substantial lessening of competition test, the Australian Communication and Media Authority’s existing media diversity tests and where necessary, the Foreign Investment Review Board’s national interest test.

The idea of applying a public interest test to determine the acceptability of any proposed further concentrations in media control or ownership may be appealing to some who may view this as an extra safeguard.

However, let’s consider how well a public interest test may operate in practice with reference to FOI.

Under FOI, a public interest test is applied, in some circumstances, by government agencies and departments to determine public access rights to documents.

This test requires the government department to state relevant factors, both for and against disclosure.

This should be, in theory, followed by a balancing of these factors, each objectively examined and given an appropriate weighting, leading to an impartial decision on whether the public interest is better served by disclosure or by non-disclosure.

When we applied in 2010 to the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) for disclosure of documents relating to expenditure on certain science programs it administered, our request was initially refused.

Following a protracted appeal process through the Information Commissioner that included scrutiny of the manner of application of the public interest test, the original decision was reversed and the documents eventually were fully disclosed.

Had this review failed, it would have been possible for us to appeal against the decision through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the Federal Court and the High Court.

No such appeal will be possible when the PIMA hands down his or her decisions.

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This opinion article by John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy was first published in the Australian Financial Review on Monday 18th March, 2013. http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/media_rules_prohibit_dissent_YY0bcVGgqdzXvNgEXC8gLO